Still in low power mode.
Heavy work load.
So, this...
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Superhero Writing Tips – Superhero Battles that Jumpstart the Plot
As we discussed in the last Superhero Writing Tips article, superhero stories feature lots of action and combat between heroes and villains. Let’s dive a little deeper into writing about these kinds of battles by taking a closer look at how they interact with the backbone of a story – the plot.
This is where we get into storytelling theory. Don’t worry, we’re not going to be getting into the hero’s journey or anything like that – let’s keep this as basic and user-friendly as possible.
If we look at a typical story, we can identify certain points that are common across pretty much any genre.
- There’s always going to be the inciting incident where our hero gets into trouble.
- There’s going to be the midpoint at which our hero has been dealt enough trouble that their only options are either to succumb or fight back even harder. Sometimes, this is called the “point of no return” by some storytelling theorists.
- Finally, there’s the climax where our hero stands up against the villain that’s been showering him with trouble, and then through a mighty effort of his own manages to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
Although we’re using language that’s appropriate for adventure/thriller/crime stories, the same sort of pattern exists in romance, Christian, young adult, or kid lit. This is the pattern of rising action where the importance of events to the hero keeps increasing right up to the climactic moment where the hero either solves the challenges facing him, or is destroyed by them. With superhero writing, each of these three areas above are typically accompanied by battles.
Round One: Fight! Battle as the Inciting Incident in Superhero Writing
Let’s start by taking a closer look at the inciting incident and how we can use a battle scene to jumpstart the plot.
The inciting incident is the moment when the story itself really gets moving. Our hero is in his normal life, pursuing his existing goals.
Suddenly, our hero finds himself thrown into trouble and is given a new goal. If we’re looking at setting up a battle with the inciting incident, the battle itself has to be serious enough to change our hero’s direction without being serious enough to destroy the hero. This battle has to serve the purpose of intriguing the reader and inspiring that desire to see justice done to the villains that started the fight.
As an example, let’s start off our hypothetical story by our hero entering his apartment in his secret identity when they are attacked by an intruder. The intruder is able to more than hold his own against our hero, even when the hero reveals his superpowers. At this point, we have set up a situation where the hero’s secret identity is blown, where the hero is facing off against a mysterious person who is able to withstand the hero’s attacks, and where the hero and the readers have to discover the reason for the attack. Regardless of the reason however, one thing is clear: our hero is in trouble and his actions from this point are going to be determined by the outcome of this initial battle.
So, should we let the hero win this initial battle, or should we let the hero lose? A lot is going to depend upon the nature of the world that you’re in. In the classic superhero world of DC and Marvel comics, the villain delivering a beat down on the superhero is usually enough to declare victory. If, on the other hand, you are in a grittier, realistic world, defeat usually equals death. Since we don’t want our hero being killed off in the inciting incident – because otherwise there wouldn’t be a story – the hero either has to win or draw in this first battle.
Going back to our example, if we’re in a gritty and realistic world, then the mysterious villain that attacked the hero may actually have a different objective than defeating our hero. He may simply be looking to steal something from the hero’s apartment and once the villain has recovered that, he will escape.
Regardless of the outcome of the battle, the hero now has a new goal that flows directly from the inciting battle.
Superhero Writing Tips for an inciting battle:
Have the battle happen to someone other than the hero.
- In action novels, there is a tradition of having a character introduced in the first chapter or the prologue that the readers get to know as a sympathetic character and who is attacked and killed by the villain. This may be something as simple as a stealthy ambush, or a heroic defense against overwhelming odds. The sympathetic character invests the reader in the desire to see justice done because this character they just got to know was killed in a brutal and nasty manner.
- The inciting battle is a great opportunity to showcase secondary characters such as sidekicks and romantic interests. Lois Lane may get involved in a bank heist gone bad, and she grabs a pistol from a fallen cop to send fire back at the bad guys, or she ushers civilians to safety. Or maybe Robin gets targeted by Deadshot and is barely able to hold his own against the marksman. You could certainly use the trope that the secondary character needs to be rescued by the hero as the overall plot of the story, or you could instead use this inciting battle as an event that has the hero struggling on the knife-edge between justice and vengeance.
As in the example above, where the hero is attacked in their apartment, have the hero attacked in such a way that the battle scares them:
- Their secret identity is blown.
- The villain throws them around like a rag doll.
- The only way that the hero is able to survive is by surrendering.
- The villain manages to uncover the hero’s hidden weakness, whether it’s something as esoteric as kryptonite, or precious as a loved one. If you’re writing children’s fiction, for example, it may be that the bully uncovers a secret that our hero believes would be disastrous if revealed to the wider world.
If the hero emerges victorious in the inciting battle, he discovers that winning it only brings even more trouble.
- In the course of the battle, he may have injured the son of a famous super villain who then turns his wrath upon the hapless superhero. This was used to set Deathstroke as one of the major villains against the Teen Titans.
- The villain that attacked the superhero ends up committing suicide rather than being taken alive. See Captain America: The First Avenger.
Remember, the inciting incident, whether it’s a battle or not has to start our hero on a different path which will take him through the rest of our story.
About the Featured Image for this post: This image is Rime 2 by Aaron Bauer and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License. The image is cropped from the original.
All trademarks and characters are the property of their respective owners. No challenge to any trademark status or ownership is made or contemplated. Any images used in this post are either used under Creative Commons licenses, or under the Terms of Fair Use under International Copyright Law which allows such use for comment and review purposes.
More to come:
We’re only scratching the surface of using battles in storytelling. We’ll take a closer look at battles at the point of no return and much more in upcoming Superhero Writing Tips articles.
RJ Andron is a writer, game designer, filmmaker, and animator specializing in building heroic worlds. He is the creator of the Black Skull, a masked New Pulp hero who fights for Justice in a time when heroes have to wear masks to face down the predators the law can’t – or won’t – touch. If you love reading both-guns-blazing pulp hero action, check out the Black Skull!
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Superhero Writing Tips – Writing Superhero Battles
Battle scenes are incredibly common in superhero comics and superhero stories. Every single story it seems involves some sort of fight between superheroes and super villains, or superheroes and the thugs de jour. In many cases, it’s actually quite refreshing to run across a superhero story that doesn’t involve some sort of punch up.
Yet, despite the presence of all of these superhero battles going on within comics, very few of them actually serve to do anything other than provide an excuse to show the superheroes in action. After all, back in the bad old days of comic books in the 1960s and 1970s, the villain of the month was introduced perpetrating some crime, and the superhero stepped in to try to deal justice to the super villain.
In a short superhero story, the one fight ends with the villain being soundly thrashed and led away in handcuffs. In a longer story, the villain escapes the first battle, leaving the superhero suffering from the mild embarrassment of being caught in the villain’s trap, and then a second climactic battle happens towards the end of the story. Again, the villain is soundly thrashed and let away in handcuffs.
In the 1980s and 1990s, superhero battles evolved to a certain extent to where the villains were necessarily led away in handcuffs but were allowed to serve as the target of the superhero’s angst. Yes, X-Men, I’m looking at you. After all, how many times in a Wolverine story did Sabertooth just happen to appear out of nowhere to provide some excuse for action scenes?
But, this is the 21st century. We can take a look at how to improve battle scenes within superhero storytelling, and we can see if we can come up with some useful guidelines that can then be applied to your next superhero story.
As always, your mileage may vary.
The Purpose of Superhero Battles
Let’s start by keeping in mind that we are telling stories here, so the battles themselves have to serve an integral storytelling function. They either have to:
- advance the plot, or
- reveal something about the characters that are involved,
- or both.
From a pure storytelling standpoint, those are the only purposes of battles. While it might be tempting to say that battles can increase the excitement level of the story – and they do – they still have to have a storytelling purpose. Otherwise, they’re simply gratuitous, and the story could survive if the battles were removed. As writers, we have to keep in mind that the readers know when something is gratuitous. They know when we’re padding the plot, and when we are simply tossing stuff in for the spectacle. They also know when a storytelling element is critical, and if that element is done well, then you convert a reader into a fan.
We’re going to look at each of these in more detail in later articles. For right now, let’s start by understanding the distinction between the battles that advance the plot, or the battles that reveal character.
Superhero battles that advance the plot:
Superhero battles that advance the plot serve to build up tension and increase the stakes for the protagonist. As the hero goes through each combat, they are trying solutions to the problem created by the villain.
Novelist John Brown in one of his writing workshops at a Life, the Universe, and Everything gathering (LTUE) in Utah put it this way. He suggested writing your story as a series of decision loops that each hero goes through in the journey towards the climax, and each time they go through a loop, the situation becomes more and more dire for the hero.
Each decision loop is as follows:
- The hero is faced with a problem.
- The hero decides to take action to solve the problem.
- If the hero succeeds, he solves the problem but there is a bigger problem that flows directly from his solution. For example, the hero thrashes the villain, stopping a crime in progress, but ends up facing down a corrupt police force that wants to arrest him. Or, the hero thrashes the villain, only to find that the villain is a pawn in a much larger plot. Or, the hero thrashes the villain only to find that the heroes secret identity is uncovered in the course of the battle. Or… you get the idea. Each solution increases the stakes.
- If the hero fails, he not only does not solve the problem, but the problem is made worse in a way that flows directly from his failure. For example, the hero attempts to stop crime in progress. The villain gets away, and the police now wants to arrest the hero for interfering in their operations. Or, the villain succeeds in activating a devious device which turns people within a certain radius into zombies. Or, the hero is soundly beaten by the villain and unmasked before the cameras of a ravenous news media. Again, each failure increases the stakes.
Wash, rinse, and repeat until the hero finally solves the problem and emerges victorious. This way, by making the situation worse and making the stakes higher with each battle, regardless of whether the hero wins or loses, we have battles that advance the plot towards the ultimate climax where the hero strives for final victory or faces final defeat.
Check out John Brown’s workshop with Larry Correia here:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bS7sSy2GMM&list=PL8B94E8B54E235F72&index=2]
Superhero battles that reveal character:
Battles that reveal character are more about how the characters fight as opposed to the actual fights themselves. We’re not only looking at the tactics that a hero uses, but also the battles that they choose to fight and the battles they choose to avoid.
For example, Superman and Spiderman try to protect the innocent as much as possible. This is why they try to lead villains out into remote areas where risk to life and property can be minimized. Wolverine and the Hulk, on the other hand, are more berserker characters, and they really don’t care about collateral damage.
When we are looking at revealing character in the course of the battle, we should first ask whether the character would actually fight this battle. Contrary to the old trope that it was the villains who would attack the heroes and the heroes would react to the villains aggression, I would argue that heroes have a choice as to whether to react or not.
If we look at a character like Batman, and he is being hunted by a team of super villains, he can either choose to confront them at first opportunity, or he could fade into the shadows, observe, and then pick the perfect time to strike when he can take them all out with a minimum of risk to the bystanders.
What does the second course of action tell us about Batman?
- It tells us that he is strategically minded because he is going to be the one who picks when the battle happens.
- It tells us that he is a brilliant character, because he is going to learn as much as he can from his observation before confronting the villains with a plan to defeat them based upon his reconnaissance.
- It also tells us that he is compassionate towards the innocent, because he wants to make sure that bystanders aren’t injured.
- Finally, it tells us that Batman understands the value of his spooky reputation. By fading into the shadows, he adopts methods that evoke mystique and inspire fear in his opponents.
Contrast this to what we learn about Batman should he choose to confront the villains right at the first opportunity.
- It tells us that he is decisive because he commits to taking action immediately.
- It tells us that he is a character who understands the importance of overwhelming the opponent before the opponent has a chance to react.
- It also tells us that he is a confident character, because he has faith in his abilities to take down the threat based on just a cursory observation.
It’s the same character, faced with the same situation, but deciding which battle he fights and how we fights the battle tells us a great deal about what type of character Batman is.
https://www.andron.ca/superhero-writing-tips-when-blowing-up-a-city-isnt-enough/Superhero Writing Tips – When Blowing up a City isn’t enough
As superhero fans, we have had a pretty good year for movies. Man of Steel, GI Joe: Retaliation, Pacific Rim, and others have all brought a lot of our classic superheroes to the screen and added a few new ones as well. All of these movies that I’ve mentioned have had big set-piece urban destruction scenes where the heroes and villains tear apart entire cities, causing the collapse of buildings in showers of metal, glass, and concrete.
And they all really miss the point.
They’re all fun movies. Man of Steel and GI Joe: Retaliation have come as close to what my mind’s eye says these movies should be. I haven’t seen Pacific Rim yet, so I’m going to withhold my judgment on that flick, but I expect that the urban destruction of massive mecha fighting Kaiju that we’ve seen in the trailers means that the guidance in this blog post applies equally to that film.
Even though these are all fun movies, the devastation of Smallville and Metropolis in Man of Steel, and the wipe out of London when Cobra Commander drops a “Rod from God” from orbit on that ancient city were moments when I actually started checking my watch to see how much longer the films had to run. And I’ve come to the conclusion that for me – and for many other superhero fans judging by the internet chatter – blowing up a city just isn’t enough anymore.
Superhero Writing: When Blowing up a City isn’t enough…
Destruction of London from GI Joe Retaliation
Back in the old days, superhero writers would have mad scientists coming up with doomsday weapons that would level cities and that would be enough to set our superheroes on twenty pages of fights, chases, and action as they fought to try to save the city and its people from destruction. But this storytelling technique was really overdone even back in the 1980s.
So, superhero writers decided to get a bit more sophisticated. They decided to let the villains win. Coast City and its 7 Million inhabitants were destroyed in the DC Universe, turning Hal Jordan into the villain Parallax in his grief. Gotham City was devastated by earthquake and turned into a “No Man’s Land,” and in 2006, the New Warriors were involved in an incident killing hundreds of people that ultimately gave rise to the Superhuman Registration Act and the Marvel Civil War.
Yeah, whatever.
The thing is, in the world of superheroes we’ve been blowing up cities for decades and we still haven’t managed to do it in a way that is able to keep the audience spellbound. We have seen the death and destruction caused in real life whether it was the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11, or whether it was the damage caused by the floods in Alberta and Toronto just this past summer. The real world is able to show us devastation that hits our souls in ways that computer-generated shattering algorithms and fluid dynamics simulations never will.
Looking at it from another perspective, as moviegoers, we have seen planets blowing up, whether it was Alderaan in Star Wars or Krypton in Superman and Man of Steel. Roland Emmerich did the disaster epic 2012, building on his penchant for planetary destruction displayed in Independence Day. And we can go on from there.
The act of destruction isn’t meaningful to us as viewers. We may watch it to see the spectacle, but we separate ourselves from what we see in order to protect out psyche. As children, we haven’t developed that ability as yet, so that’s why parents don’t normally let kids watch scary movies. It keeps them from having nightmares, and allows the parents a full night’s sleep.
For the rest of us, we know the destruction of cities is all fake. The people within are fictional, nameless images on a screen. This problem has only become worse with the advances in computer graphics. In the race to build more and more realistic scenes of cinematic urban destruction, viewers treat each new spectacle as just another example of geeks playing at pushing pixels around on a screen. Considering that I’m a computer animator myself, I know just how much that can hurt those of us in the industry.
So, what do we do?
As creators, and as superhero writers, how do we keep the audience on the edge of their seats tense with excitement? How do we make the stories we tell exciting and leaving the audience wanting more?
Stealing ideas from Romance Authors for Superhero Writing
Romance is one of the more popular genres of fiction. It has a ravenous fan base that consumes massive word counts of stories all spinning romantic fantasies. Though some “serious writers” look down their noses at Romance as being derivative and formulaic, the fact is that Romance outsells every other genre out there. In fact, according to statistics, 1 out of every 6 books sold in 2012 were romance novels.
The genre publishers openly admit that there are formulas with plots that follow a very rigid structure that predict turning points to within 1 to 3 pages. Romance writers typically shorthand “HEA” for “Happily Ever After” as the necessary payoff for each and every book. Each set of characters in the romance sub-genres could be defined as stock characters: billionaire, rancher/cowboy, secret agent/cop, high-school sweetheart, sheik/prince/royal – and that’s just in the modern genres. Historical romance, from Regency to ancient has casts of characters from pirates to gladiators and all of them are instantly recognizable without varying too much from the template. I don’t think that too many Romance writers would be too offended if I said that Romance publishing puts the “mass-production” into “mass-market-fiction.”
So what are the Romance writers doing right that we Superhero fiction writers are doing wrong by blowing up cities? Why is it that as a genre they can move 16.7% of the book market and Superhero books languish in a publishing ghetto?
More to the point, what can we learn from them?
As readers, we like to become involved with the characters that make up our stories. We want to root for the heroes and what they stand for, and we also want our own version of HEA.
Our heroes have relationships – romantic and otherwise – and those relationships matter to us as readers. If we can get our audience to like our characters then by extension they will like the people our characters like and hate the people our characters hate. And, if you’ve done it right, then the audience will also root for those happy relationships to move towards HEA.
On the other hand, if you threaten those relationships as an author, then the audience’s tension level rises. If you credibly threaten the character then the audience is going to be on the edge of their seat.
Here’s an example: In Man of Steel, the highest point of tension in the movie was when General Zod appears with his Kryptonian guard at the Kent family farmstead and threatens to kill Martha Kent. The film had previously established that Martha and Jonathan Kent were loving parents who had raised Clark Kent to adulthood, and that Clark had a very strong familial relationship with his adoptive parents. So when Zod is threatening to kill Martha Kent – a character both the hero AND THE AUDIENCE LIKED – the only thoughts going through the audience’s head at that point in the film were whether Clark would get there in time, and, if he did, would his appearance be enough to stave off the attack by Zod and his guards. Any one of these guards would be more than a match for Clark. Zod more so. All of these bad guys together and at that point the audience cannot see any way that Martha Kent comes out of the encounter alive.
So, we wait on the edge of the seats as Clark rushes to the rescue, hoping that he’ll be in time but doubting that he could be.
I guarantee that no-one who had been watching the movie up to that point was checking their watch to see how much longer the film had to run. Compare that to how the audience felt when Metropolis was being destroyed.
What lessons for writing superhero stories can we take away from Romance writers and the Man of Steel movie?
- Give your hero the chance for a relationship the audience would like to see as a “happily ever after” type of relationship. This doesn’t have to be a romantic relationship – a relationship with a family member, colleague, police commissioner/detective, librarian – whatever. As long as this is a relationship the hero wants and would like to have continue.
- Threaten the relationship. Either the person in the relationship is threatened directly by the bad guys, or the person could be possible collateral damage when the bad guys threaten to blow up the city.
- The threat must be a result of the villain’s actions and not because of the target character’s incompetence. Jimmy Olsen, Superman’s Pal, was always getting into trouble because of his own foolishness and is pretty much a joke character nowadays who is saved from DC Comics polling their readership on whether he should live or die only by the fact that they haven’t gotten around to asking yet. Even Lois Lane in the 1950s-60s got threatened nearly every issue and it wasn’t until John Byrne took over Superman in the 1980s that she actually became a competent reporter. Compare that with the Rachel Dawes character from Batman: The Dark Knight. She becomes threatened by the Joker not because she is incompetent – far from it. She becomes threatened because the Joker is very good at what he does.
If you’re going to blow up a city, give the audience a reason to care about it by making it personal. Put a character the audience cares about in the path of destruction. They’ll thank you for it.
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